Sister Wolf

by Ann Arensberg

  These dozers, knitters, and cuticle pickers thought that the suffering of wild animals extended to worms and flea bites, and that their peril could be annulled by placing “Deer Crossing” signs on two-way roads. She remembered Dr. Devane, the gentleman vet, refusing to splint the leg of a hurt raccoon that she had brought him in a cat-carrier. Marit had spent hours watching that coon, sauntering on his unbroken hind legs, longer than his front legs, elevated in back like the rigged chassis of a stock car.

  “Better put him down, Marit, you’re a good shot.”

  “I’m paying for it, god damn it! Pretend he’s a cocker spaniel!”

  “Let him go, Marit. Wild things cure themselves sometimes.”

  She had splinted the raccoon’s leg herself, in an agony for both of them, the splint fastened on knock-kneed, and Marit’s fingers bitten to the bone from forcing painkillers down his throat. He had limped away and she had searched the property for days, finding him dead, out in the open, by the winter garden. If only a swifter predator had finished him off; but she knew that she might have given him too much codeine.

  Could this grangeful of rural worthies feel the death or dwindling of species on their own bodies, like a pain around the heart? One hundred and fifteen bobcats ran in the Berkshires, according to the latest headcount. Inspecting some acreage near Mount Greylock, Marit had come upon one of them. Along for the walk—if mincing in wedge heels was walking—Lola had gone off to see if the real-estate agent had been lying about a trout pool on the property. She had come back to find Marit with a spotted body laid, Pietà fashion, across her lap, the tufted ears and neck ruff drooping limp in death; and Marit holding a spring-trap out before her, which encased one severed, dripping paw, like a reliquary. Lola had stumbled out of her shoes and crouched down. She had dragged and pulled until Marit gave up the trap, and torn off her silk ascot and mopped at the blood on her friend’s arms.

  “Honey lamb, you’re a mess; poor fella; he’s not a bob-kitty; stop calling him that; Marit, I’m going to have to slap you!”

  Marit’s mouth twitched, and tears filled her eyes. She wiped them with the tips of her fingers, pretending that she had a lash or a mote caught under her lid, in case anyone was watching her. She preferred to think of herself as a person who did not cry easily. She had not wept at Vlado’s deathbed as he lay choking on his last breath. Luba had usurped all the grief in the atmosphere, leaving her daughter dry and stone-faced. Was she weeping now for herself or for the animals? Was their danger only a mirror of her own helplessness? Scorn and dishonor, if she were just a well of self-pity, and the animals her way of plumbing it. Was it merely her own death she saw on the charts that she scanned, the yearly census of diminishing animal populations? She could imagine shooting a woman in a leopard coat, or a dandy in elephant-hide moccasins, with a shell of outsize caliber and without remorse. Did Geronimo scalp white soldiers out of bloodlust, or to defend his shrinking homelands? If there were no wild corners left, the world would be like this unventilated Grange Hall, filled with upright sheep musing quietly in their chairs.

  Marit saw a figure—two figures—across the hall, and felt a presence behind her.

  “I don’t like to disturb you in your private thoughts, Miss Deym.”

  It was Sheriff Stoeber. She did not bother to turn and acknowledge him. Her gaze was fixed on Gabriel Frankman in the distance. A woman was with him, claiming his attention. She was carrying a schoolbag shaped like a briefcase, or a briefcase that looked like a schoolbag. There was a large percentage of men and boys at Meyerling: had Gabriel vowed never to associate with members of his own sex?

  “What can I do for you?” Marit asked, giving the Sheriff her profile. Gabriel’s companion had chunky calves and a cap of black hair. She wore ballet slippers and a full skirt puffed out with petticoats. Perhaps she thought she had come to a session of country dancing.

  “Folks called in about noises out by your Old Road fence.”

  The Sheriff had sidled into her line of vision, but Marit did not meet his eyes. She addressed a mole in the center of his forehead.

  “What kind of noises?” she asked.

  He was holding his hat in his hands and kept turning the brim. She shot a look past his head. The black-haired woman was gone. Gabriel was standing alone.

  “Like a dog baying. But these folks said it was different.”

  “I have a malamute, Sheriff. Sometimes he gets into the sanctuary.”

  “Well, I heard it was more than one, and they answered each other.”

  Suddenly, Marit caught the threat in his words. She looked him in the eye and favored him with a smile.

  “People are like that, Sheriff. They know I keep animals, so they hang around the fence on a dare, like kids on Halloween. Why don’t you refer those calls to me? We must educate people.”

  She extended her hand and he touched the tips of her fingers. Then she nodded. He took her nod as a dismissal and backed away as if he had been trained, like a courtier, not to turn his back on the sovereign.

  Sounds of alarm began to ring in Marit’s head, scoring pictures of ruin. Pictures of beautiful cream-gray Lakona and her new wolf pups, ambushed in their den. Pictures of hunters with fresh-killed skins hanging from their belts, wiping their bloody knives across their thighs. Marit made her way toward the rear of the Grange. The anteroom would be empty. She slipped through the inside doors into the entrance hall. No one was there, just a pile of leaflets on a trestle table. She pressed the heels of her palms into her eye sockets, pressed as hard as she could, to wipe out images of doom with a pattern of flashing dots.

  She felt hands pulling on her forearms, pulling her hands away from her eyes. She could only see black, but she gave in to Gabriel’s touch. Now his hands were linked behind her head, cradling her head, and his voice murmured words to calm horses (easy, easy, steady there, hold on), until the fight went out of her shoulders, which were squared all her waking hours.

  “I came to find you,” he said, and pressed her head down on his shoulder.

  She could see now, and remember her dread. She shied away from him.

  “You know. You saw them,” she said, and for an instant she thought that he might have called the Sheriff.

  “What did I see?” he asked, moving a half-step toward her.

  “You saw the wolves. The Sheriff knows I have wolves. I need more barbed wire. I can raise the voltage. I need another malamute, a mate for Nikolai. I could tell him they were howling at each other. …”

  “You’re babbling,” said Gabriel. “Keep your voice down.”

  He advanced on her, crowding her. She held up her arms to ward him off. He reached out and wound his hand in her hair, without jerking her head, taking care not to pull her scalp. He raised her head, requiring her to look at him. She was very still, like a cat being held by its scruff.

  There was a rumble from behind the inside doors. The meeting was over. Gabriel whipped his arms to his sides as if he had been spined.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, grabbing her hand. She did not stop to question his choice of words. They dashed toward the outside door and made a vaudeville exit. He stubbed one rubber toe on a warped floorboard, while she grappled two-handed with the rusty doorknob that would not turn. He sent the door flying, finally, with a kick from the same stubbed foot, and an angry groan.

  Marit drove back to the house with the accelerator down to the floor, as if an all-points bulletin had been put out on her car. Inside the house, she pushed the door shut very carefully in order to damp the faintest clicking of the lock. They crossed the hallway on the tips of their toes and sneaked up the staircase, wincing when they made a stair board creak. Marit led the way over the carpeted corridor toward her childhood bedroom. At the open door of another bedroom Gabriel pulled her back. He pointed inside.

  It was Luba’s room, converted to a guest room. A galaxy of silver-framed photographs had stood on the bureau and covered the walls; they were stored in the attic now, boxed and
tied and labeled. Luba had slung ropes of amethyst, coral, and pearls over the mirror sconces; she thought it was too fussy to coil each necklace up, every time she wore it, in its own chamois case. When she supervised Vilma, her maid, packing for a trip, Luba had a photographic memory of the contents of her drawers and closets, down to the color system by which her sweaters and lingerie were filed. When she came home late from a dinner, and Vilma was asleep, her memory failed her; she let her garments lie wherever she happened to step out of them. She had done her maquillage in the center of the room, without a mirror, smoking and talking to Marit or Vilma. Marit had never crossed the blue Chinese rug without raising clouds of face powder as she walked.

  Since Luba’s death, Marit had purged the room of its patrician slovenliness, but not its glamour. It was a room that trapped the light and held it, even as the day waned, in the chased surface of the silver altar candlesticks on the dressing table, in the oval mirror framed in gilt-wood ribbons over the headboard, in the golden eyes of the peacock feathers printed on the bedspread and the heavy looped draperies.

  “Here,” said Gabriel very softly. “It has a double bed.”

  Marit laughed out loud. “Why are we being so stealthy?”

  They moved to the side of the bed, facing each other, their arms crossed in front of their chests. A space of two feet yawned between them. Gabriel’s back was to the window. The late-afternoon sun struck him from behind, outlining his figure with light. His features were in shadow; she could not read his face to get her cues. She shut her eyes and reached out a hand to feel his cheek. He turned his face into her palm and kissed it; then he pulled her over the gap.

  How much kissing any couple does standing up is a matter of stamina. If they discover that their mouths fit, that their teeth have nerve endings, and that they like quick tongues, their knees will take longer to buckle, but they will fall of their own weight, eventually, on the floor or the bed. If they are wearing light summer clothes and no underwear, the clownish business of undressing is accomplished faster. The man’s socks give the only trouble, since removing socks, when he is lying on his back, requires two hands and a sudden forward arching of his body.

  The night the wolves brought Gabriel to Marit, they had gone to bed in the dark; the only memory they had of each other’s body was lodged in their fingers and on their skins. They could see each other now, the pale one and the dark one, against the background of royal-blue fabric patterned with peacock feathers. They touched what they saw, reviving memories and laying in new ones: Marit’s breasts, round and full, but placed high; the line of down that led from Gabriel’s navel to his pubic curls. In pubic patches, the spectrum runs from modest to riotous: hers was discreet and close-fitting; his was woolen. They did not break their pace with a long spell of musing and looking. Marit and Gabriel had the same metabolism; they wanted it fast, not slow. They wanted peaks, not erotic bypaths, no stopping and starting, no ice cubes, no garters, no honey and pepper on the lingam, no foreign inserts that play the chorus from Beethoven’s Ninth. They paused once, on their knees, to look at themselves in the mirror, whose antique silver backing had worn and reflected them chastely.

  Of the act itself, there is never any memory, no more than there is of being stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel, or of the pain of tonsils being cauterized. Some of the stage business is remembered later, and some of the sound cues: Gabriel covered Marit; she did not have to guide him in; they both made a lot of noise; the door to the bathroom was open and a tap was dripping. If Marit had been more experienced, she would have known enough to be grateful to Gabriel for not starting up to soap and rinse his penis. They had not pulled back the covers; there would be crusty white spots on the peacock feathers.

  Gabriel collapsed on his back like a sprinter after a race. He did not open his eyes, even to look at her, until he woke up later when the room was nearly dark. Marit curled in as close as she could, on her side, with her head on his shoulder. She was not at peace, but she would not move, or disturb him. She did not know how to nap or doze, so she was consigned to keeping the vigil. Their skins were stuck together. Her arm, which was lying below his belly, had the beginning of a cramp in the wrist. She flexed her hand slowly, but he flinched and murmured. She scanned his face; he seemed to be frowning. He had that look, which she remembered from their first encounter, of a soldier in effigy, alien and complete and locked away, making a lie of their perfect connection. There was no clock in the room, and she could not calculate the time. His features were drawn and sharpened with fatigue; he might sleep for an hour, or through the night. She felt a surge of guilt for her greed, which had drained the spirit from him. How was she going to lie without moving for even an hour, with one arm bent under her like a broken wing? Her other arm, resting on the hair that grew above his penis, had started to itch.

  A breeze had blown up outside, as it does in the foothills, to chase away the heat of summer afternoons. Their sweat had cooled, and Marit was chilly except where their bodies were touching. There was a lap robe draped over the foot of the chaise longue, if only she could get it. Why was she clinging like a limpet to a reef, alive with discomfort, cut off from grace by the stony form of a sleeping man? She was not the same girl; she had turned into a craven mendicant. The world had stopped until he woke up. When he did wake up, they would have to begin from zero. Shared ecstasy gave her no rights and no expectations; it had wiped out the past and created a void around them. That was not exact: she thought she knew what to expect. He would open his eyes, as dazed as a victim of concussion, search the room for some sign of his location, and stare at her as if she were a stranger. He had said the magic I Love You. He had said it more than once, along with other binding endearments. But his words and caresses were single and separate; they did not build a personal history.

  Daughters of Magyars do not lie shivering in the service of commoners. Marit pulled away from him and scrambled off the bed, bouncing the mattress and making the bedposts vibrate. She shot a rueful look over her shoulder, but he had not moved. He was dead, for her purposes; he belonged entirely to himself. Her white flannels and blue linen shirt were heaped at her feet—boyish rumpled clothes that usually gave her Dutch courage. His khaki trousers, with a belt through the waist, were piled under hers. Another menial instinct took hold of her. She held up the pants by the cuffs, bringing the creases together so that she could fold them over the chair and hang out the wrinkles. As she folded them, his wallet fell out of the back pocket, with a plonk, on the floor. There are very few girls, newly in love and muddled by it, who would put a billfold full of secrets back in its place, and not stand rooted with alarm like a soldier who knows that he is holding a live grenade. Marit hunkered down out of eyeshot from the bed, bare and trembling, but no longer from the cold.

  It was a cheap, battered wallet, coming unsewn, filled with plastic windows. Some still-benign part of her brain remembered a drawerful of Vlado’s accessories, among which was an elegant passport-size case of Italian leather. She would give it to Gabriel; she would like to give him beautiful things. There were cards in the windows, nothing to account for her sped-up heartbeat—Social Security, Walker Niles Memorial Library, draft status, blood type, driver’s license. Other items were stuffed behind the cards that showed through the plastic. She squeezed apart one of the windows and pulled out a piece of ruled paper, which was written on in a crabbed, miniature script. The paper had been folded many times, and she leaned close to read it: hooded merganser, scaup, rough-legged hawk, brown creeper, pine siskin, dark-eyed junco. … It was his life-list of birds, with numbers beside the names for the month, day, and year in which he had sighted the species.

  She smiled to herself and decided to open the other windows, in the interest of thoroughness, like a chore to be got out of the way. In the center of the second window was a stiff piece of paper, which stuck. She pulled it out carefully. It was a photograph, in profile, of a girl. Squeezing open the next window, her fingers fumbled. There was someth
ing inside. The same girl, full-face and smiling. A girl like an illustration from the fairy books, the kind of girl who turns into trees, wears a train of dewdrops, is borne across the waves on a cockleshell. On the back of the photographs, written in the same tiny script as the life-list, she read “Francesca, Vinalhaven, 1955.”

  Marit sat down on the floor, crossed her legs, and arched her back. She could hear her heart thudding in half time in her temples. There was no other sound, inside or outside the room, no crickets or tree frogs, no breeze through the leaves, no owl or animal cries, or cars on the road. She was as still as the world around her, calm and suspended, like the landscape when a tornado is in the neighborhood. She felt no pain as she had at the fair. Gabriel’s student seemed like a figment of a rival; the fairy creature in the snapshot was a fact of his secret life. Marit felt poised and excited, as if she had always known that this girl existed, or someone like her. Her eyesight was as clear as her brain, and she scanned the darkening room like a hunting cat.

  Gabriel was sitting up. He held out his arms to her.

  “I had a bad dream,” he said. “You went away.”

  She saw how frail and unguarded he looked. He had slept his hair into cowlicks. The wallet was still in her hands. There was no way to hide it.

  “You weren’t dreaming,” she answered. “I got out of bed because I was cold and got right into trouble.”

  He reached over to the bedside table and turned on the lamp. She held up the wallet.

  “It fell out of your pants,” she said, “but I didn’t have to open it.”

  “Open it, baby, open it. I’m yours, it’s yours, what’s the problem?”

  Marit hung her head. “Perhaps you should have told me.”

  “Told you what? How much time have we had for talking?”

  She could not look him in the face. She was losing bravado like an airplane losing altitude.

  “The pictures.” She paused for a second, waiting for the sword to fall. “Snapshots,” she said, bearing down hard on both parts of the word. It was taking Gabriel a long time to react. It had already taken him six or seven seconds. When she was swimming underwater, she could only hold her breath for a count of ten.